Day 5 - Artificial Intelligence (n.) 🌞

Are we living in a simulation? (🌞 Sabbatical Series Day 1 - 7)

Jul 06, 2025

noun.

: the capacity of a computer, robot, programmed device, or software application to perform operations and tasks analogous to learning and decision making in humans, such as speech recognition or question answering. AI, A.I.

: a computer, robot, programmed device, or software application having this humanlike capacity: AI, A.I.

On my journey to answer “What’s the purpose of life?”,
I needed to answer these 3 questions:

2 Down 1 to go.

~~Where to live for 5 years~~ Bali, Indonesia - Asia
How do I have freedom of time and location
~~What to learn for the next 5 years~~ Food & Water

I’m excited about my new adventure in the Food & Water industry, but AI is disrupting everything. I need to stay ahead. Maybe there is a chance that it gives me freedom of time and location - solving my last question.

Big American Bet

Thanks to the internet, the biggest export from the U.S became technology, beating energy and agriculture. During 2023, technology export was $650B compared to energy at $300B and agriculture at $160B. This includes all the tech you can think of that are produce by the US: social media & search engines, cloud data storage, Computers & Phones, and more. They are betting that AI software and hardware will contribute even more to this number.

Trump administration is going to the Middle East to do exactly that - sell US AI hardware. They believe the partnership with middle east energy source, they can supply the world with AI software.

They are betting on the world adopting AI for productivity. And they will use American made AI software.

It’s very clear that China is seeking to undermine this strategy by making their AI tools free.

How small Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley

For the Chinese, they don’t need to be ahead in the AI race. The world is already depending on China to produce most things. In fact, just by lessening the reliance on the U.S, they stay ahead.

Where is AI now In Q3 2025!?

AI makes lazy people lazier

People know that they can’t learn math if they use the calculator. They do it anyways.

Many more people are now writing essays and taking exams with AI.

The recent MIT study showed that if we use AI (chatgpt), we don’t use our brain as much. In short, the study said, “ones used AI can’t recall what they wrote”.

We could’ve guessed this one.

The worst part? It killed creativity. The writing looks like the same.

Here’s the comparison graph from the study, between ChatGPT group vs. ones who only used google search vs. the ones who only used their brains.

AI Creativity

There was actually a lot of temptation for me to use AI to write this newsletter or some parts of it - but ultimately I decided to stick with my brain.

A big part of my decision was that I realized the limits of AI today, and likely in the future.

It’s better than we are in terms of memory, looking at micro details that we might miss, but can only repeat what we have already done.

It can’t come up with original ideas just yet because ideas typically come during showers and AI can’t really take a shower. Jokes aside. Ideas come randomly.

Alright, some ideas look like they are new but they are just from other people or they are from combination of many of people. That’s why Hollywood is suing Midjourney, the leading AI image generation company. They put the pictures of the AI generation vs. Original and they look identical.

The image generators are getting real ballsy with these blatant recreation of original characters. It’s like they are driving around a stolen red Ferrari with the license plate still attached.

Starwars movie screenshot. Used in the Disney vs Midjourney lawsuit.

It’s just too obvious - all of these guys will get sued. Here I created an image with Japanese IP - maybe it can pass by as fan art, but any moment I “could” get a call from Japan to tell me to take it down and I can’t imagine anybody would argue against that.

Now there are some interesting stuff brewing where the owners do give permission. Like my own image for example - you can see the quality improved quite a bit since September 2023 to what I made this week. The company is called Heygen:

So is AI taking over or not!?

Well let’s put it this way. The coding agents are probably the most advanced because that’s where the money is. However, even the best coding AI is making mistakes. Those mistakes compound over time. We can’t even leave them alone for 1 hour to work on a complex project. It needs to be on a short leash.

We are at least a few years away from AI doing things without close human supervision. Then it’ll start with simple stuff and the super complex stuff will always require human - like brand building, making movies, building rockets or even designing your own living room - Things with taste. Cool factor.

Coming up

Okay now we can take a breather, let’s take a look at what’s ahead:

Noise. a lot of BS content that are AI created will be flooding across all the news, social media and more. Like this one.

Templates. All the designs will look the same, the colors will look the same, the products will look similar and what you get from it will be the same. Don’t mean to pick on these guys but they all eventually look the same: